An exciting new anthology, Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online synthesizes decades of experience and pushes forward dynamic conversations about feminist pedagogy and remote learning, offering a meaningful and much-needed contribution to this area of research and teaching.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic brought online teaching—its strengths and its shortcomings—to the forefront of higher education, feminist teachers have spent nearly two decades grappling with how to integrate the ideas, values and practices of feminist pedagogy into online learning environments.
Teaching online, in both synchronous and asynchronous formats, has been part of my experience as a college professor since my graduate training. Today, as an instructional professor who teaches entirely online, feminist pedagogy and online education are indelibly linked for me.
Edited by Jacquelyne Thoni Howard, Enilda Romero-Hall, Clare Daniel, Niya Bond and Liv Newman, Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online is freely available (as a PDF and ebook) through Athabasca University Press’s Issues in Distance Education series. It is also available in print—an important addition for university libraries.
Organized into four sections with 14 chapters, plus a helpful introduction and robust conclusion, the anthology covers a range of teaching issues—including course design, classroom management, utilization of technology, and negotiating philosophical challenges in teaching in contemporary colleges and universities.
Overall, the collection strives to explore how online education can “align more thoughtfully with intersectional feminism and practices of social justice education.”
Part 1, “Promoting Connections, Reflexivity, and Embodiment,” actively thinks about the relationship between teaching online and building student connections. Authors embrace reflexivity for both instructors and students (though I wish there had been more about reflexivity for administrators) and explore how embodiment asserts itself in online teaching.
One exciting element in this section, the “Relational Course Design Collaboration,” models collaboration between faculty and instructional designers.
In Part 2, “Building Equity, Cooperation, and Co-Education,” authors explore how to bring foundational elements of feminist pedagogy into the online teaching environment with rich and meaningful examples. Essays in this section consider how to build participation in online classrooms, reflections on technology integration, and how to implement process-based learning through activities like consciousness raising and social annotation.
The third section, “Creating Cultures of Care in the Online Classroom,” explores how online environments can be infused with feminist pedagogic principles, and how to teach with care and humanness in the current moment in the university.
The fourth section, “Interrogating Knowledge Production, Social Inequality, and Power,” raises important feminist questions about power in relationship to the contemporary universities and technology, including risks of misinformation, digital privacy protections and surveillance technologies.
Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online, in print and as an electronic book, was preceded by the FeministsTeach.org website, demonstrating the dynamic interactions between online environments and books today. The website went viral in August 2020 when large numbers of college professors were grappling with how to teach online. Two of Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online‘s coeditors, Dr. Thoni Howard and Dr. Daniel, compiled resources for colleagues at the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University for online teaching.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a range of educators used the compiled material, and the guide’s popularity and reach grew. Today, FeministsTeach.org invites educators to enter the database of material assembled through six different pathways: tenets, authors, topics, annotated assignments, insights and (eventually) exhibits.
As a complement to the book, the assignments pathway offers an extraordinary window into both the array of assignments that professors are using in classes and an opportunity to see the many different ways people implement feminist principles into online teaching and the evaluation of student learning.
The subjects pathway is an expedient one for educators who think, hm, I’d like to add x to my class; this might include blogs, social media, podcast, annotation tools or another form of technology. This pathway provides a way for users to drill down efficiently on particular tools. Overall, feministsteach.org is a rich resource for online teaching for deep engagements in pedagogic questions related to feminism and social justice.
Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online is highly recommended for professors teaching online and university libraries.
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